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Is "because fuck you a year from now" that much better than "because fuck you?" I like the way my Perl programs keep working when I copy them to a machine where the sysadmin has decided to install the "latest and greatest." The sysadmin likes the way I don't ask him to install an old Perl to un-break my working programs.

The Perl core folks can do whatever they want (as if they need my permission!), but their emphasis on backward compatibility saves me a lot of headaches, and those saved headaches are part of why I keep using Perl. How hard is this to understand? I'm not making demands or threats; I'm just trying to explain why, in a world with too many programming languages, I continue to use Perl for day-to-day tasks.

[Their] emphasis on backward compatibility saves me a lot of headaches, and those saved headaches are part of why I keep using Perl.

That same relentless emphasis on backward compatibility creates a lot of headaches, too. How many security holes exist because two-arg open still works? Why do I have to write the same boilerplate every time I start a new Perl program to ask the compiler for help? Why can't we have a class keyword? Why is the return value of system() inconsistent with the rest of Perl? W

I have no idea. How many of my programs are easier to use because it
still works? This seems like the same attitude that led the GNU folks
to put in a non-STFU-able linker warning about using
gets. The C folks got it right when they made
cc and lint separate programs -- assume the
user know what he is doing, but let him ask for hints.

Why do I have to write the same boilerplate every time I
start a new Perl program to ask the compiler for hel

I may be a dirty pinko commie about the real world, but I'm a software conservative. If Bob Sysadmin upgrades Perl to version X, and Jim-Bob Sysadmin keeps it at Y on a different machine, it's a waste of my time to maintain two versions of my scripts... er, programs. Perl's (past?) sometimes-painful focus on backward compatibility and portability is one of its main featur